The present invention relates generally to primary packaging and more particularly, to manually openable packages for containing a product. Specifically, the present invention refers to manually openable packages formed from recyclable materials.
Discarded packaging materials often wind up in a landfill. In some countries, particularly the U.S., there is a significant decrease in the availability of landfill space when approximately 90% of the municipal solid waste is disposed of by landfilling. Recyclable packaging materials can dramatically reduce landfill waste. Today, there are a number of plastics considered recyclable which may enter established recycling streams. These materials include low density and linear low density polyethylene, high density polyethylene, polypropylene, polyethylene terephthalate, polystyrene and a few others. Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles and jars are generally considered recyclable. The PET can be recovered and recycled again and again thorough washing and re-melting for use in new bottles or jars, or by chemically breaking down the PET into its constituent raw materials, which are then purified and converted into new PET resins. In the last few years there has been a significant increase in the use of PET trays by the packaging industry. Unfortunately, most of these trays and other PET containing packaging cannot be easily recycled because they are made up of a plurality of layers of a variety of plastic materials. Recycling of such packages can involve costly cleaning and sorting operations to separate the recyclable plastics from any non-recyclable materials. The fewer the non-recyclable materials there are and the more chemically similar the recyclable plastics present in a package, the less expensive and more efficient the recycling operations become.